movement

In 1968 H and T immigrated from 50°7’N 8°41’E to 34°S 151°E. Four months after revolutionaries hurled molotov cocktails and discovered new worlds hidden beneath the cobblestones in 48°48′N 2°20′E, they crossed seas and lands and terrains and territories. New worlds. Border zones. (Migrants) Boat people with names made up of a strangulated complication of vowels and staccato multi-syllabic rhythms (like the sounds in your ears if you say these words out loud). Nomads tracing out oceanographic exodus: a desire for escape for mobility for freedom. Sometimes T sold lemons and oranges that she found on land, sometimes H sold his electricians skills boat to boat in places such as 34°S 151°E, 12°40’S 141°52E, 12°28’S 130°51’E, 08º35’S 125º35’E, 08°39’S 115°13’E, 10°30’S 105°40’E, 12°10’S 96°50’E, 21°06’S 55°36’E, 34°22’58"S 56°32’30"W. Itinerants labouring to continue their movement, their search for the vastest distance away (from there), their search for somewhere that wasn’t a capture.
When they arrived H stayed in 33°52′28″S 150°59′23″E. It wasn’t for long, it wasn’t like now: he wasn’t imprisoned, he wasn’t a terrorist threat (they ascertained) and he didn’t need to wait years to be set free. T told me when I asked her on the phone just now – she in 48°8′N 11°35′E, me in 37°47′S 144°58′E – immigration was easier in those days. We arrived with nothing. We wanted freedom, not like in 51°N 9°E where we couldn’t breathe. We chose dis-place-ment. We wanted to be able to escape. Don’t you find it easier to move here (to breathe here)? There was space here. Space to move around. The light was different (and the military would not conscript him). The nationalist rhetoric they despised hadn’t found its way to this remote continent (they talked about you dirty wogs – ey hohr-st what did you say I can’t understand your accent mate). They taught themselves english and H always made me watch documentaries about 51°N 9°E to show me what they had left behind moving forwards (every time someone quizzically stumbled over ahnn-djugh-can-guy-zeer I wanted to just be j-ahy-nuh suh-mi-th vic-toh-ree-ah pee-tehrs loo-see juh-own-z). T worked cleaning houses and cleaning the arses of old people in Lutheran homes and H drove ferries back and forth back and forth back and forth. They wanted to give us everything.
At first they thought it was their (hetero)topia. Their island in an island on an island in the sea 33°38′30″S 151°17′24″E. They came here from 23°50′56.34″S 151°15′45.56″E. 
A new world away from the aboveworld of cobblestones equal to destitution and grey faces and political lies and the shadows of war. But later, just before H stopped, he said to me: its no different here. They are fascists here too. They lock refugees in concentration camps. They let asylum seekers drown. They kill their indigenous peoples. I’m scared that when you go to protest they will beat you up, those nazi police those pigs. He said: what they do here is disgusting and he breathed out his despair. Breathe in breathe out. Everywhere it is the same. He looked at me his eyes bright. I said: but nowhere is the same, nowhere is identical. No-where. Now-here. Similar enough to feel trapped to feel the nausea of realisation (that everywhere the State is in power it will feel the same somehow) but different enough, lines of longitude and latitude degrees separated enough, to be something else really somewhere else.
I feel trapped he said and he left on his boat to trace paths of desire in the oily water of the bay. He dreamt of fleeing to 20°17’14"S 57°44’17" E, 29°53′S 31°03′E, 33°S 27°54′E, 33°57′29″S 25°36′E, 33°57’05.16921"S 18°28’06.76131"E, 15°57’S 5°42’W, 7°57’S 14°22’W, 38°50’N 28°W, 17°1’N 61°47’W, 50°52’N 4°22’E, 51°N 4°E, 52°22′N 9°43′E, 45°05′27″N 3°54′27″W, 40°N 4°W, 28°30’N 16°25’W, 28°41’N 13°56’W, 33°32’S 56°54’W, 12°03’N 61°45’W. I said I feel like I can’t stop, I just can’t stop. T said I hate this place I want to live on the mainland and not on this fucken island anymore. Then she fled. And came back. And fled.
Moving illegitimately, we move, us itinerants. All of us itinerants in one way or another. All of us moving, particles, atoms smashing together, bodies, gestures, limbs akimbo, racing hearts, terrified of stopping, terrified of going, but needing desiring mobility, changes of scenery, a change is as good as a holiday. Moving pausing moving pausing transversing pausing. Singularly and collectively. Agents of mobility. Across borders fences frontiers locked gates invisible demarcations. Pausing. Pausing: like so many others (some of them foreigners, wogs, nazis, laughter ringing in response to his brazen broken language eventually they got bored of laughing) he clung to his heterotopia and then, when it failed him, when he stopped moving, we scattered him across the sea where he was lost in the momentum of the waves somewhere around 33°45′S 150°42′E and 33°38′30″S 151°17′24″E.
Always moving. Moving. All ways.
Exhausted. In a liminal zone where the body threatens to fade into the environment. Tired of shifting all these papers around, these documents, these boxes. 
Exhausted, he steps onto the 14.40h train. “This is the 14.40h service operated by Southern Rail Services.” Eyes burning from the computer screen, he gazes at the platform number and gets on the train.
The train is a wonderful place to be at 3pm on a friday, crawling slowly overground, with a strange kind of delay to the rest of the city: the urban setting is about to switch from production to consumption, with the bars and restaurants filling up, but on the train, neither of those really applies.
This slight distance invites into a strange kind of spectatorship, where everything seems familiar and unknown at the same time. Someone going to a cash point, they want to buy a ticket for the underground, sigh as they insert their card into the reader, prices of so-called ‘public’ transport keep going up, because that transport is no longer really public. 
The city flies past and in doing so it seems to make sense, but to what does that mean? With what kind of gaze is he looking at all this, what expectations? There’s visual complexity to the urban spectacle, which he’s been taught to appreciate via TV and cinematic images – but his eyes are burning, and he has no time or energy for romanticizing.
He looks at the billboards, they are easy to decipher. Calling him to express his ‘self’ or “get a mortgage now”. The train halts gently. He looks again. The billboards stand there like titans, out of context, interpellating anyone and no one, too large to relate to any of those bodies or vehicles circulating on the roundabout. How can anyone go so clumsily about constructing a set, with the proportions that wildly out of scale?
The train starts moving again. More billboards. The awkward effect of their size disappears suddenly – indeed, they are made for people moving past them at a certain speed. The city functions as a transitional and transactional space, not the kind where one halts or stops. If one does, the effects are alienating. Most spaces are made for passing through, except those so called private ones that are often linked to consumption: kitchens, living rooms, bars, restaurants, gardens. He sighs and rubs his eyes. What about trains?
Next to two titanic advertisements stuck onto a railway bridge, there is an old shopping centre. Once surrounded by a market, there now is another billboard. It announces the “Southern Regeneration Scheme”. Small figures at the bottom of the billboard, waving little signs and a banner: “We can’t eat luxury flats”. He wishes the train would stop. 
He’s trying to hold some five thoughts at once, but there is a headache coming on. He wishes he could be on a train through the south, another kind of south… to close his eyes for some thirty minutes and go past lots of markets and old houses.
What is a train? There is something important about trains…
In relation to other technologies of transportation – not to speak of technologies of communications – trains are old-fashioned and slow. They don’t abide by the speed of the urban and social factory. They cause delays, and are disliked for that – people get bored on them and ask, why can’t arrivals be facilitated ever more effectively?!
Old style locomotion isn’t very sexy – no plugs, no bar-restaurant, no plasma screens, no music, no champagne bar, no on-board lottery, no duty free shopping. There are efforts to ‘innovative’ trains though. The Eurostar is an example of gated, elitist and consumerist style of new trains: champagne bars, passports, small seats, high speed, expensive tickets. Many people come from far just to get on it once. Once and never again, in order to make a final leap from France to England, in hope of a better life. Eurostar won’t have low income migrants, nor will France or the UK of course. This kind of train is a vehicle for deaths that aren’t suicides at all.
Like airplanes, these new style trains play a part in keeping out people who can’t be good consumers, admitting ever so few who can struggle their way through as migrants without papers, and managing the flows of those ‘good’ citizens capable of consuming and producing on the ‘right’ scale. The kind of scale that allows us to have ever faster trains, bigger billboards, and eyes that burn non stop.
Slow trains offer a much different space, somewhat on the margins of post-fordist cultures of productivity. (see entry self-) They put the “self”, whatever its referent, into a process of shifting and transition… while the body rests or paces up and down the corridor, there are layers and layers of internal movements going on. These trains, by virtue of their gentle movement, offer the possibilities of exit and delay, as well as of meeting people and spending a couple of hours with them – talking or staring out the window with them. These trains make space for modalities of self-narration that are not so much driven by an incentive to productivity, networking or self-representation. Scattered moments of train-conversations rather allow for strange articulations to emerge: stuttering, stuck-ish modes of address. Precarious sociability, vulnerable strangers. Eyes wander out the window, magazines work as mediating devices.
A train is a friendly space for bodies in metamorphosis, for having a conversation beyond usual protocols of relationality, speaking to people with whom we don’t necessarily share a world of referents, vocabulary and use of language. We meet people who, like us, are on a train and thinking things through in a dream-like space, narrating experiences back to themselves in various terms – and why not also to each other? We listen strangely, with an attention for difference. Trains ask for a peculiar mode of attention, for a kind of listening that is disinterested yet nonetheless careful.
“Train” is a space of projection, imagining and remembering. The train carriage is a space where we get a sense of our selves in a process that can still somewhat measure itself against the pace and rhythm of the body. Metabolism takes place on various levels. He can sense himself getting hungry, he wonders how long this journey across town can still take, and whether there might be enough time to strike up a conversation.
He likes to think that trains carry vacuoles of publicness, whereby a certain space of polite relation and care for a general context are shared. They also hold the possibility of a differential mode of attention, infinitesimal insecurities, micro-questions and slippages, perhaps giving onto larger questions. 
 
Think of an analogous space where “self” loses hold of its usual referents, tokens and distractions. The train is the analogous movement of “self” across geological, social and psychic zones of complexity, which is shared with other bodies who are undergoing similar movements. Train is the space that hosts these movements in a larger movement of a set of carriages.
It is a fact that the train only runs because of this collective movement, which comes from the convergence of multiple desires to do something else with the “self”, to remove it from productive visibility for a while and let it find its “own” story along the many hours of its journey, letting questions follow from that. Movements of invisibility, invisible movements, inside-outside blurred.
In this sense, trains constitute “technologies of the self” (Foucault), granted that “self” can be cracked open as a referent. Through the sharing of our train-selves, we become capable of mounting self-trains with others, larger social movements that can be driven by a desire to go somewhere else.
We gather at the margins of the space of productivity and representation, to pick up on the sensitivity that allows us to reconfigure our sense of “self” all the time. That is a “self” that exceeds the hyper-networked modes of individuality: industry and interest can get lost a bit, and other kinds of ideas and desires emerge. This is always a shared sensitive space, since it depends on the parallel movement of desires and selves, towards the platform, mounting the train.
We imagine ourselves on a train even when we’re not. We try to embody that strange kind of invisible movement. When walking through the city, we pause and look, we set up a chair where there isn’t supposed to be one according to the local council. We sit down together and find our shared temporality.
The scene was like this: there was an arrival of the reader’s eyes to the paper and a fictional meeting of the words written on the paper and the invisible writer with the reader. Like two singular events: a provisional and temporary arrival (of the stranger coming into the space that makes a place to stay); and a situation of ‘guests’ or ‘intruders’ that the situation intends to experiment with. Both, performers and public, reader and written words-writer, are unknown to each other; both are guests of each other; both are intruders inside the world that the other owns for him/her self. It starts like this:
We both occupy this space and our mutual ‘stays’ in here are different from each other. 
As intruders, we could inhabit the uncertainties we may re-present in front of each other; we could inhabit a world in which our presence would be too artificial, illegitimated, incorrect, pirated, betrayed. We definitely cannot integrate each other. This is the concept that cannot take place in here. I don’t need you to assimilate my words. I’d rather like that this paper could make our differences more perceptible. As intruders, we should keep on behaving like “intruders”. Our differences marked, singularized. This difference per forms the human tissue of which theatre is made of. In this theatre, the “arrival” is always marked by the “unexpected” otherwise maybe there is only so much distance that we can only critic or identify.
My words are in here a fortuitie presence. I ask for a place. A place marked by the limits of your wealthy silence. At the same time I wish I could keep on preserving my own self. But this “entrance” of you in my universe is creating des order: You are at this moment dis stabilizing and dis organizing the very purpose that took me to write all this.
I’d like to keep on thinking your thoughts and your body as being not yet integrated and thus, engaging us politically. I’d like to think of you being next to me and proximate. I’d like to think of you as a singularity being inside my mind and my body. And thus, observe and work with you: the way you expose me, the way you export me and dis own me from my body.
Let’s define our relationship. At first, we have to think of a concept with which we’ll meet through our doings. But maybe, there is no concept as such. No under-standing but in fact the relationship of our different “standings” next to each other. Our standings make loose the initial premise and its primary value. We may be producing something else here: something that neither you nor me may expect entirely. A question comes to mind: if we are not under-standing but “standing”, upon which ground are we standing then (if any)? Crossing over which limit? Stepping over what surface? Which is the rhythm of that stepping? Or which is the quality of our parallel walks along each other? Or better: could our doings, be an act of self-interest and desire? Or could rather be an act of selfishness? If so, let’s organize this practice then:
If I cannot think of my own as “having my own self”, I cannot think of what I use and surrounds me, what informs and per forms me as having a concrete essence. Instead I could think that it is perhaps the missing essence of a theory, a philosophy, and idea or subject what I try to articulate over and over again. It is not the “thing” itself, but the resonances it left me. In fact, this “missing essence” is an untranslatable notion, its very articulation and actualization supposes the production of a different knowledge, this being the production of knowledge with a practice that IS in becoming a “sensible object”. This sensible object is made out of people working together building up a microstructure that reveals its own discourse and politics. People’s doings could be an “intervention” or “interruption” manifesting or calling for different attention and different perceptions. Collectively is us, individuals experiencing the sensible object along the way: A battle through our bodies in the world.
As if we are working, “standing” within a practice in which all we do is to be with each other in movement. It is this ‘with’ what interests me: I am my-self, double, and therefore not alone. We are people producing meaning through out relations, through systems and signs. The experience of the moving-with is the experience of decision-making under any specific situation. I’m talking about a movement and positionalities informed by the person who passes through it and occupies a space, by his/her engagement and their performance within it, and a performance in which the unspecified rules are not only represented but also experimented with different decisions, and decisions becoming singular forms of engagement and reflection. I mean Decision as oppose to Opinion. Decision contains a much more ethical degree of engagement. Not so much about what is what we desire the most (that would be only like producing pleasure) but which are the qualities of our desires. Even further, the ability to produce another type of desire: Desire for less desire.
This experiment doesn’t happen alone: it is shared with an audience and thus involving the spectator in that moving territory in which the result doesn’t lie on what you see but rather on what you cannot see but only as a possibility. This is the very value that the experiment undergoes: a giving value that lies first on the offer in itself; second on the fact that the performer and maker don’t have the answers and that they rather prefer not to own them; and third one, on the exposure of a community consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing. Sharing without essence, but with divisions. One that ‘offers’ what he/she doesn’t even have or knows is someone who is on the road and present therefore, what is shared, is not the completed identity of all in one, what it is shared is, sharing itself, and so everyone’s none identity of the work to itself in communication, offering itself, holding itself, in suspension.
The preparation of this encounter cannot be reduced to covering myself up with clothes, images, or speeches, which render myself familiar to you, but requires finding gestures or words, which could touch you in my alterity. I’m drawing near necessities; I’m allying this intimacy without submitting it to you. Attraction is awakened by the difference between our two worlds and by the mystery that our different activities may represent for to each other. This intimacy wants to push out for a little bit of violence. To cover you with the pigments of my imagination is to favor, without doubt a violation of this mystery but not to a real approach between us. Such an approaching can exists in the respect of our two familiarities, which connect, without canceling each other out. If I only include you in my universe, then I’m only preventing myself from meeting you.
We have to work at another means of approach, advancing step by step towards an uncovering of you and myself to comeback modified. But one thing reminds: only in what is still independent of the influence of someone may proximity take place as event an advent. Something arrives again, and not in order to keep it as a thing but as a mysterious legacy of this encounter which it is important to remember without simply appropriating it. So this could be our project: to comeback to this paper and being with it realizing its limits over and over again. It is an activity, not a state. It is at work, working an unworking the very lines, which gives it sense. It is sensing its very undoing, and in doing so, dinamycizing another link, another and, another with.
The anatomy of this project problematizes its subjects, and at the same time mobilizes new resources. It increases the reality of its possibilities: “Possibility and Power” derivate from the same word, posse, and also “potential”. The potential to work together in this way opens up possibilities.
I invite you to keep on moving closer and closer apart in this field: Apart-ness as being one side of closeness. Perhaps in acknowledgement of itself and, certainly, as a guarantee to comprehend what I’m saying and understand that our affective world is our own individual property.
We are building up this project and playing a game: we implicate in fictions and narratives that we take up as our own. Unbounded. On the field, we display a number of possibilities, which means that, what we display is, our powers in order to keep on continuing with the game. We don’t aim for a fusion in the field, because then, the game will be finished. What we aim for is the continuity of an activity-in-common (which implies also a risk): Our value in here is not that of freedom (specially in the reality of working together and learning together). Freedom is not only achieved through out the belief on a disappearance of the limits, but it is achieved by the increasing of affective capacities and of its real possibilities. Our value then is the “autonomy” we perform, meaning the capacity to be able to choose a plan and be able to realize it in practical terms. This means as well, a performance as “an experiment of autonomies in relation”, playing the limits that render it possible, in collaboration…
Anja Kanngieser, Manuela Zechner, Paz Rojo 2008-06-26T05:12:20Z 35 true movement

2008-06-29T03:58:17Z